Featured Arkansas Artist: Marlene Gremillion

The Arkansas Studies Institute houses four art galleries, including a retail gallery, featuring the work of Arkansas artists and art related to the state. This post is part of a new bi-weekly series featuring ASI gallery artists.

Marlene Gremillion
Marlene Gremillion is a sensitive person who enjoys life and her surroundings. She examines the beauty of nature, especially in bright sunlight—looking for the transparency in flowers and the shadows cast by one object onto another. Texture and shape play a major role in her paintings, along with color that expresses a mood and feeling shown in the subjects she puts to paper or canvas.
Traveling with her husband throughout the United States, Marlene loves mountains, streams, and flowers—subjects visible in her realistic and abstract paintings and collages. Marlene is a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is a registered nurse. Her sensitivity and attentiveness when caring for others has carried over into her artistic endeavors. Marlene is active in the arts in her community and has also studied art extensively, polishing her watercolor techniques as a major subject. She has taken workshops from nationally renowned artists, whom she feels have broadened her abilities to really see minute details that can express an atmosphere in a particular piece.

Marlene explores visually varied subjects, along with photographing and just sitting and taking in the ambiance of God's creation. She has displayed her expressive photographs and has also used them as tools in her paintings and collages. She is unable to put to words to why she must create, except to say she feels a desire to keep on trying something new. "It's like I'm a child with a new toy each time I pick up a paint brush full of paint. I've just got to have fun!" Marlene also enjoys sharing her knowledge of art by teaching classes and workshops throughout the state.

Marlene is a signature member of Mid-Southern Watercolorists (Arkansas) and Louisiana Watercolor Society. She is a charter member of the Ouachita River Art Guild in West Monroe, Louisiana, and a member of Brush Strokes in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. Her art is presented at the Arkansas Studies Institute Retail Gallery in Little Rock, Arkansas; Backwoods Gallery in El Dorado, Arkansas; Ouachita River Art Gallery in West Monroe, Louisiana; and Artist Workshop Gallery and Gallery 726 in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Marlene and her husband live in the mountains of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, and have retired, devoting full time to the outdoors and the creating of art and grandchildren!

Click here to see more work by Marlene Gremillion.